Distantly Close | Can BJP rebuild its dented pro-women image?

Even as the rest of the country coped with distressing video clips of a rapacious mob humiliating and sexually violating Kuki women, there was scant evidence of justice getting delivered elsewhere to those constituting over 48% of our population. All too suddenly, the ruling dispensation’s “Beti Bachao” call seemed reduced to an empty slogan.

Amid the outrage over Manipur, two influential politicians and a self-styled guru got relief from the courts. One got bail, the other came out on parole and a third was discharged of serious charges primarily on account of poor investigations and witnesses turning hostile. The common strand in these cases was alleged harassment and sexual exploitation of women.

Justice delivery for womenfolk appeared elusive, be it the faraway northeast or the Hindi heartland. Incidents of rape and violence in the Opposition-ruled Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal besides the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-controlled Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh heightened the political slugfest while the need was to denounce such happenings in one voice. The political class forgot that regardless of its geographical location, violence against women was condemnable. For political point scoring, it cannot be treated par for the course or be compared to assaults of the proportions witnessed for days on end in Manipur.

As such bipartisan wisdom had no-takers, it was left to the Supreme Court to drill sense into the mindless, often insensitive public discourse. The judiciary’s counsel was doubly welcome because the unbridled whataboutery had spilt to parliament from mendacious social media and TRP-hungry television channels. The ugly outcome of it was the Treasury and the Opposition locking horns over rules rather than debating the issue on a priority basis.

Unlike in the past, there aren’t any tall parliamentarians around to help strike a middle ground. Or to broker a truce!

As if to add insult to injury, the government insisted on a short-duration discussion, rejecting the opposing side’s demand for a full-fledged debate with a reply from the prime minister (PM). As the logjam persisted, the newly formed Opposition group going by the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) moved a no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha.

That’s what happens when statesmanship is a diminishing trait. The Treasury’s vastly superior numbers did not matter as the purpose wasn’t to oust the regime. A no-trust was the only instrumentality available to the Opposition to make the PM speak and be accountable to the House. In light of the apex court’s strong July 31 observations against attempts to draw parallels between Manipur and sporadic sexual attacks on women in Opposition-ruled states, it’ll be interesting to see the Centre’s line of argument in the upcoming debate.

As the scope of a no-trust motion is way wider, the case of former Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh is bound to be flagged by the Opposition in the contest of the ruling party’s failure to safeguard women against sexual harassment/exploitation. The PM has kept his counsel on this case the way he has on Manipur on which he briefly spoke outside Parliament on the debut day of the ongoing Monsoon session.

If the Manipur police were criminally lackadaisical in acting against the vengeful mob that heaped the ordeal on the Kuki women, the Delhi police did no better. Having registered an FIR against Singh on the SC’s intervention, the Delhi cops “neither opposed nor supported” his July 20 bail plea in the court of a Delhi metropolitan magistrate.

To put it mildly, the police/prosecution’s position was inexplicable and divorced from the gravity of the cases against Singh. The MP has been accused by several women wrestlers including those who won laurels for the country, of sexual harassment and seeking sexual favours during his long tenure as the WFI president. He can, if he so decides, be in the House when it takes up the no-confidence motion.

Equally unbelievable is the Haryana administration’s kid-gloves treatment of rape and murder convict Gurmeet Ram Rahim, the head of the politically influential Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) undergoing a 20-year jail term for rape and murder. A day after Singh’s July 20 bail, he was released on parole for 30 days by the BJP-ruled Haryana, having been similarly let out in January this year. His followers spread across several states, even the Congress cosied up to him in the past to electorally encash his support base in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Uttar Pradesh.

Sentenced in 2017 for raping two of his women disciples at his Sirsa headquarters, the DSS don was convicted four years later of murdering a former manager of his sect. He has had five paroles since.

Ram Rahim managed to have his way with the Haryana government despite protests by the Sikh clergy, especially the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) in adjoining Punjab. They take exception to the frequent paroles for him as some of his Dera-adherents are suspects in the 2015 sacrilege of the Guru Grant Sahib in Faridkot’s Bargari village.

The desecration which did immeasurable political damage to the Akali Dal, which was in power at the time of it happening, is still a hot political issue in the border state. Pro-Khalistan elements such as the recently detained Amritpal Singh have frequently used Bargari to push their separatist agenda there.

As if that wasn’t enough to hurt the BJP’s outreach to women, four days later, on July 25, Haryana MLA Gopal Kanda, whose Haryana Lokhit Party is part of the National Democratic Alliance, was let off by a Delhi court for alleged abetment to suicide of an air-hostess employed by his since defunct aviation company. A key prosecution witness turned hostile in the case in which the deceased Geetika Sharma left behind a suicide note blaming the MLA for her decision to end her life.

The reigning narrative begs the question: can the party known to be an election-winning machine rebuild its pro-women image?

HT’s veteran political editor, Vinod Sharma, brings together his four-decade-long experience of closely tracking Indian politics, his intimate knowledge of the actors who dominate the political theatre, and his keen eye which can juxtapose the past and the present in his weekly column, Distantly Close

vinodsharma@hindustantimes.com

The views expressed are personal